Re: Compiler for Red Hat Linux 8

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Joern Rennecke wrote:

> > 	Red Hat employs a large number of highly skilled GCC developers.
> > If GCC 3.0 or the GCC trunk is not stable enough / correct enough to use
> > in a GNU/Linux distribution, Red Hat's developers can work to improve and
> > stabilize a particular FSF GCC source base as effectively as any other GCC
> > source base.
> 
> That is not true.  Contributing to the FSF GCC sources requires patch
> review, which often doesn't happen.

Since Red Hat has two thirds of the global write privileges maintainers,
presumably they can arrange that someone does review patches Red Hat needs
- unless, of course, the problem is that the patches aren't clean enough
for the FSF tree.

> Our tree contains infrastructure to enable our Q/A to work.

Is this infrastructure something of potential use outside Red Hat?  If so,
is it available as free software?

> The GNUpro source base also has changes so that there are no spurious
> bug reporting instructions.

People will still send bug reports to the GCC system when they shouldn't;
gcc-bugs and the GCC GNATS database get some bug reports for *-cygnus-*
versions, which are presumably ones which do not direct bug reports to
gcc-bugs or the GCC GNATS database.

If the Red Hat 8 GCC version were based off a GNUpro version, but that
version were checked in to the FSF repository on a branch, that might at
least help people trying to respond helpfully to misdirected bug reports
and questions work out what is in Red Hat's release - as well as avoiding
wasting people's time on the "seek out GNUpro releases on the net" game
<URL:http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-03/msg00660.html>.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk